Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [75]
Since it is difficult to say no to a question like that, most of them said yes. When the bishop came for his annual visitation, they lined up before him for the laying on of hands. Calling each of them by name, he dipped his thumb in holy oil and made the sign of the cross on their foreheads. Then he clapped his big hands down on their heads and summoned the Holy Spirit to descend upon them, making them fit servants of the living God.
Afterward there was a big party in the parish hall, which many of those young people mistook for graduation. The first adult decision that some of them made was to not attend church anymore, which helped explain why so many grown-ups held adolescent views of faith. Sixth grade was as far as they had gotten in their schooling, which meant that many of them lived the rest of their lives as spiritual twelve-year-olds.
Typing my syllabus, I wondered how much different church might have been if I had been expected to give grades. How many absences do we get? Will this be on the final exam?
“Course Requirements,” I typed, spelling them out one by one: attendance, reading, writing, field trips, group presentations, exams. It was like planning a trip to some place I had never been, with twenty-five people trusting me to know where I was going. I did not know where I was going, but I was eager to start.
My first class at Piedmont College was scheduled for Tuesdays and Thursdays at 8:00 AM, the Siberia of the school week. Even now, I vividly recall my first 8:00 AM class at Emory College thirty years ago: the dank basement room with clanking radiators, the stark fluorescent lights, the musky smell of wet wood when I woke up with my face flat on my desk beside a small pool of drool.
Of the subject matter I recall nothing, nor of the professor. All I remember is the physical agony of trying to maintain consciousness for an hour and fifteen minutes with the entire gravity of the earth pulling my head down toward the satiny surface of my desk. I tried adjusting my posture. I tried sticking a sharpened pencil in the pads of each of my fingers. I even tried taking notes, but the sucking power of sleep was too great for me. Over and over I lost the good fight, waking up to the sound of chalk screeching on the blackboard with no idea how long I had been out.
I do not recall ever wondering when I was nineteen how this affected my professor. Almost thirty years later, it was payback time. I spent a small fortune on things that I thought might keep my students awake. I purchased a boom box on which I could play world music CDs. I stockpiled all the religious relics I had brought back from other countries: Turkish prayer rugs, Tibetan bells and drums, Thai Buddhas, Greek icons. I composed crossword puzzles that employed key terms from the vocabulary lists in the textbook, and I rented videos in which a British man with very long sideburns traveled around the world interviewing people of various faiths.
My classroom needed all the help it could get. Two dozen tan plastic chairs with Formica desktops were scattered haphazardly across a linoleum floor. One of the fluorescent tube bulbs overhead flickered in the acoustic tile ceiling, making a buzzing sound like the whine of a small drill. A rack of ancient maps stood near the blackboard, which was so slick with age that chalk slid right off it. The first map, of India, showed no sign of Bangladesh. Sri Lanka was still labeled as Ceylon, and Myanmar as Burma. Lifting the heavy page to see what else was underneath, I tipped the whole rack backward and sent it crashing to the floor.